Can you accept the moments of anger and fear as guests,
be willing to receive them with kindness
without feeling obliged to serve them a five-course meal?
Christina Feldman
Author: Karl Duffy
This is a Mindfulness Practice Blog written in Laois, Ireland, containing reflections on meditation practice, psychological growth, spirituality and wellness which hopefully may encourage and benefit others as they reflect on their lives and seek to develop a more balanced, mindful and conscious approach to it.
Getting lost in the thinking mind
That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their “possibles”, in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them
Georges Bataille, French intellectual, 1897 – 1962 L’expérience intérieure (Inner Experience)
With thanks to Laura Rai, dedicated Researcher in the Psychology Department at Maynooth, for sending me this quote
Meeting ourselves
For us to be free, we need to stop believing the thoughts that something is wrong. We need to stop running away from the very vulnerability that needs a profound type of self-compassion. Whatever we cannot embrace with love or with acceptance imprisons us. It keeps us in the trance of a bad self. So the path of emotional healing is really the path of stopping the war, of pausing, of not believing the judgments, of not continuing to punish ourself. Instead of running away and trying to escape the rawness that is here, really meeting it with a deep, deep compassion.
Tara Brach, Meditations for Emotional Healing
Nowhere to go
Where is there a place for you to be? No place.
Nothing outside you can give you any place.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
You needn’t look at the sky because
it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it.
You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards
into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
If there was any Fall, look there,
if there was any Redemption, look there,
and if you expect any Judgment, look there,
because they all three will have to be in your time
and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
Flannery O Connor, Wise Blood
Fears leave
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Wendell Berry
photo chris reynolds
Wanting different weather
Even though the hawthorn trees are in full bloom here and the old proverb, – “ne’r cast a clout til May be out” – tells us that it is time to switch to summer clothing, one cannot do so yet. Frequent heavy showers are followed by calm and sunshine, which is good for growth in the fields and the garden, but not so good for being able to get out for a walk in them. A lot of mental energy is wasted in wishing that external circumstances were different and “suited” us better.
A monk said to Master Tozan, ” Cold and heat descend upon us. how can we avoid them?” Tozan said, “Why don’t you go where there is no cold or heat” The monk said, ” Where is the place where there is no cold or heat?” Tozan said, “When cold, let it be so cold that it kills you; when hot, let it be so hot that it kills you.”
In this teaching “kill you” means kill your ideas about how things have to be for you to be happy. It may sound odd but you can be practicing mindfulness with discomfort and pain and be quite happy. The happiness comes from the pleasure of just being present, and also from the confidence that you are gaining – a confidence that, with ongoing practice, you will be able to face whatever life brings you, even pain, aided by tools such as mindfulness.
Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elelhant.
